Imagination is freedom…on writing, self-publishing and all things fantasy

Tag Archives: ganache

I hope everyone’s 2015 has started off in an exciting way! I’m happily (and furiously) working on book 3 of my Psyne series, Radiant, due out this August. I had PRK correction eye surgery last November and anyone who has had it done knows that it’s grueling to wait the four to six weeks it takes for the eyes to heal and vision to become 20/20. Emailing was put on hold as was writing and blogging but I’m back and more importantly, I can see again!

Today’s topic is one of my creative obsessions: cakes. I have a thing for fondant. In 2009, I decorated my first cake with fondant instead of frosting and I was hooked. Since making fondant cakes is a creative outlet of mine and most of them incorporate an element of fantasy, I thought I’d share them with you.

After I published my first novel, Luminous, fellow blogger and author, Sara C. Snider, posted an author interview of me and in it she asked about my cake-making hobby. Be sure to check it out if you haven’t already. For my daughter’s 3rd birthday, I went a little crazy with the castle cake using a Wilton kit for the amazing turrets. It was a fantasy castle, there was no way I could resist!

I baked up mermaid tail cupcakes for my very first Mermaid Tea which was loads of fun and then there’s the Steampunk cake I did for my friend, Abigail Sloan, the artist who did the artwork for the Luminous cover.

She introduced me to all things Steampunk and so for her birthday, I had the best time putting this together for her.

Two of my favorite features on it is the purple Steampunk mermaid tail and the Kraken tentacle holding the paintbrush.

After that, the holidays picked up and by the end of the year (2013) I was burned out and in much need of a vacation. It took me a while to bounce back and that’s why I didn’t keep up with posting about my other cake creations. But better late than never and so here I am to show off the other cakes. At the beginning of December, I did this Minnie Mouse cake for Minnie-obsessed four-year-old daughter.

I found several on Pinterest and chose certain elements to re-create for this cake. Cutting out the letters by hand using the Disney font for inspiration was particularly challenging and fun. I’m a certified ‘font junkie’!

The best thing about the Minnie cake was that I got to try doing a polka dot cake so that when you cut into the cake, each slice features polka dots, just like the ones on Minnie’s dress.

I found the awesome polka dot cake tutorial on Pinterest (of course!) at Once Upon A Pedestal and it’s easier than you’d think!

The key is to freeze your cake pop balls before you put them in cake pan and pour cake batter over them. Freezing will help to keep them moist and adding the pudding packet to the cake pop balls when baking them helps too. It’s all in the tutorial!

Usually December is far too busy for too much cake-making with family birthdays, Christmas, New Year’s and all the seasonal baking that goes on. But I just had to make this birthday cake for my friend, Joanna, who is the designer for the covers of my Psyne book series. She has a well-developed appreciation for Tim Burton and is a fan of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The puncture wounds in the top layer is one of my favorite parts of this cake.

One of my other favorite aspects of the cake is the shiny red ganache dripping like blood over the white fondant. It was super easy to do thanks to the tutorial from Cookies and Cups and since then, I helped a friend use it as lava on a volcano cake for her son.

I cut the letters by hand using the lettering used in the movie poster for Dracula as my guide.

The cake was made with red velvet and the top layer had a cherry filling (without the chunks of cherry) so that when you cut into the cake, it oozed ‘blood’.

That concludes Part One of this post on my cake craziness. Part Two will be posted soon!